Boltz Founders Exit as Unnamed Bitcoin Group Agrees to Take Over Suspended Swap Service

Boltz’s original founders have stepped down, and an unnamed group of “veteran Bitcoiners” has agreed to take over the suspended Bitcoin swap service, the company said Wednesday.

The incoming operators will provide capital and engineering resources, while work to find and fix vulnerabilities is underway, according to Boltz. The company said it was withholding the group’s names for now and that the goal was to restore swaps “as soon as possible.”

All original founders left the company effective immediately and will have no formal or authoritative role in the project, Boltz said. Any future participation by them in its open-source software would be voluntary.

Boltz said it suspended the service on Aug. 3 after AI-assisted attackers targeted it with increasing frequency, intensity and sophistication over several months. The company said several attacks succeeded and caused losses, but that user funds were never at risk because the service is non-custodial.

In its Aug. 3 outage notice, Boltz said attackers were iterating faster than its team could find and patch flaws. On Wednesday, it described itself as a bootstrapped five-person startup that lacked the resources to withstand the attacks over the long term.